The early wide-screen technologies, like CinemaScope and Cinerama, used huge screens to immerse the audience, and even with today's smaller multiplex screens, I can recover something like that sense of being snugly wrapped in the movie's world.

I can't vouch for the merely wide-screen version that opens next week, but the action sequences shot in IMAX—one-quarter of the film opening today—lift this fourth installment of the near-venerable series from impressive action to spectacular abstraction.

June 11th, 2009 at 7: 20 am dj barber – Actually I pictured this story as a wide-screen movie theatre extravaganza, a spectacle of starry photography with surround sound, threatened towers just barely visible in the distance, under the clear Texas-like sky.

This is reaffirmed two years later, where Gardner has begun to spot a trend, when he writes (emphasis mine): In fact, it seems to me that the percentage of really hard-core 'hard SF' has gone up sharply in recent years, as has the percentage of wide-screen, Technicolor, baroque Space Opera, stuff reminiscent of the old 'Superscience' days of the '30s, but written to suit the aesthetic and stylistic tastes of the' 90s.